Chapter 1 Introduction to Client / Server Model

Objectives
What is Client / Server? Typical Client / Server configuration Applications of Client / Server model Pros and Cons of Client / Server model What is a Browser? What is Hypertext and Hypermedia? Ages ago (in Internet time), when mainframe dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a new approach to computer networking called "client/server" emerged. Client/server proved to be a more costeffective way to build many types of networks, particularly PC-based LANs running end-user database applications. Many types of client/server systems remain popular today.

What Is Client/Server?
The internet that we now commonly use consists of two types of computers. One is the Client and the other is the Server. Client/server is a computational architecture that involves client processes requesting service from server processes. If you think of the Internet as a sort of plumbing for data transfer, a common model for sloshing the data back and forth is called the client-server model. A client-server model for networked computer systems involves three components: the client, the server, and the network. A client is a software application that most often runs on the end user's computer host while a server is a software application that most often runs on the information provider's computer host.

Client software can be customized to the user's hardware system, and acts as an interface from that system to information provided on the server.

To make it simpler lets take the example of Television broadcast station and Television sets as our client/server model. A server is sort of like a television broadcast station, making its information available to anyone who would like to receive it. Clients are like television sets - you tune it in to the station you want to watch. The television broadcast station sends the signal in a standard format which is ready for viewing by any kind of television set - black and white color, big screen, whatever. You don't have to create different versions of Gilligan's Island for different television sets. In general, client/server maintains a distinction between processes and network devices. Usually a client computer and a server computer are two separate devices, each customized for their designed purpose as shown below.

Although the client/server idea can be used by programs within a single computer, it is a more important idea in a network. In a network, the client/server model provides a convenient way to interconnect programs that are distributed efficiently across different locations. Computer transactions using the client/server model are very common. You can take the example of your bank account - To check your bank account from your computer, a client program in your computer forwards your request to a server program at the bank. That program may in turn forward the request to its own client program that sends a request to a database server at another bank computer to retrieve your account balance. The balance is returned back to the bank data client, which in turn serves it back to the client in your personal computer, which displays the information for you. Client/server networking, however, focuses primarily on the applications rather than the hardware. The same device may function as both client and server; for example, Web server hardware functions as both client and server when local browser sessions are run there. Likewise, a device that is a server at one moment can reverse roles and become a client to a different server (either for the same application or for a different application).

What are the applications of Client/Server model?

As you all know some of the most popular applications on the Internet follow the client/server design like:

Email clients FTP (File transfer) clients Web browsers

Each of these programs presents a user interface (either graphic- or text-based) in a client process that allows the user to connect to servers. In the case of email and FTP, the user enters a computer name (or sometimes an IP address) into the interface to set up future connections to the server process. For example, an Earthlink subscriber enters the name smtp.earthlink.net into the configuration settings of their email client to allow them to send messages over the Internet. In the case of email, a person generally enters the server information only one time, as the server side of the connection rarely changes. When using a Web browser, the name or address of the server appears in the URL of each request. Although a person may start a Web surfing session by entering a particular server name (such as www.yahoo.com), the name regularly changes as they click links on the pages. In the Web model, server information is provided by the HTML content developer encoded in the anchor tags.

So what are the Pros and Cons of Client/Server model?

Client/server was originally developed to allow more users to share access to database applications. The client/server model has become one of the central ideas of network computing. Most business applications being written today use the client/server model. Compared to the mainframe approach, client/server offers improved scalability because connections can be made as needed rather than being hard-wired. The client/server model also supports modular applications. In the so-called "two-tier" and "three-tier" types of client/server systems, a software

application is separated into modular pieces, and each piece is installed on hardware specialized for that subsystem. One area of special concern in client/server networking is system management. With applications distributed across the network, it can be challenging to keep configuration information up-to-date and consistent among all of the devices. Likewise, upgrades to a newer version of a client/server application can be difficult to synchronize or stage appropriately. Finally, client/server systems rely heavily on the network's reliability; redundancy or fail-over features can be expensive to implement.

What is a Browser
A browser is a software program that interprets and displays information located on the Internet and WWW in a particular way. Text-only browsers such as lynx do not display images or sounds, while fully-featured browsers such as Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer can display graphics and animation, play movies and sounds and movie clips, and run software programs that are imbedded in Web pages, access different parts of the Internet, and with the right "helper" applications, view 3_D worlds and more. Browsers are continually developing, so the possible uses of the browsers are always expanding. HTML tags and attributes are interpreted differently by different types of browsers. The appearances of the various page elements may differ from browser to browser. However, the structural relationship between elements will be the same. The World Wide Web is developed by researchers at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, in early 1989 and is designed on a system known as hypertext. The developers of the web proposed the Web as a way for scientists around the world to collaborate using a global information system based on hypertext.

What is Hypertext and Hypermedia

Hypertext is a method of linking and organizing information in a networked environment. Readers of hypertext can choose their path through a text by selecting "links" to other documents. It is this "linking" (sometimes referred to as "hyperlinking") which provides the

interactive element to hypertext that is the main method of navigation on the Web. The term hypermedia is used interchangeably with hypertext to denote the linking of sound, images, video, and other non-text media.

Summary
Client/server is just one approach to distributed computing. Both client programs and server programs are often part of a larger program or application. Network clients request information or a service from a server and that server responds to the client by acting on that request and returning results. This approach to networking has proven to be a cost-effective way to share data between tens or hundreds of clients. Usually the client and server are two separate devices on a LAN, but client/server systems work equally well on long-distance WANs (including the Internet). A browser is a software program that interprets and displays information located on the Internet and WWW in a particular way. Hypertext is a method of linking and organizing information in a networked environment. Questions 1. Discuss Client / Server architecture. 2. What are the applications of Client / Server architecture? 3. What are the pros and cons if Client / Server architecture? 4. What is a browser?

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